The Five Stages of Grief in A Pleasant Fiction
Note: the following was originally presented in Chapter 36 of Coming of Age, Coming to Terms: A Companion Guide to The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction by Javier De Lucia.
The five stages of grief, first introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying, have become a familiar framework for understanding how people process major loss. Though originally developed in the context of terminal illness, the stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—have found broader resonance in the landscape of personal grief. They don’t unfold in neat, sequential order. People cycle through them, revisit them, blend them together. But even with those caveats, the framework offers a helpful way of tracing emotional movement through pain. In A Pleasant Fiction, Calvin McShane’s story provides a vivid, layered example of how these stages might emerge—not in textbook order, but organically, through memory, responsibility, and the attempt to keep living when it feels like everything has collapsed.
Calvin’s experience of grief isn’t limited to a single death or a single loss. Over the course of the novel, he loses his mother, his father, his disabled brother Jared, and his close friend Stan—all within what feels like a single season of life. Compounding these losses are the years of caretaking that preceded them, the complicated memories tied to each person, and the collapse of beliefs that once helped him make sense of suffering. There is no singular “grieving moment” in the novel. Instead, grief pulses through every chapter, every errand, every memory. And the stages—though blurred—are there.
Denial shows up early, though not in the form of disbelief. Calvin doesn’t pretend his parents are alive. He doesn’t deny that his brother is gone. But the numbness is there. In the opening chapter, as people at work casually ask how his summer is going, Calvin is struck by the absurdity of the question. His summer has been defined by death, by loss, by the hollowing out of his family. And yet he finds himself going through the motions—replying politely, fixing the pool, worrying about broken appliances. Denial, in his case, is the practical avoidance of emotional collapse. It’s easier to be annoyed by pool equipment than to face the empty house and the quiet that used to be filled by the sounds of his parents and brother. Even the task of cleaning out the house—ostensibly a simple sorting of belongings—becomes a daily confrontation with loss he is not yet ready to name out loud. Every unopened box, every forgotten item, offers a new opportunity to not feel what he’s feeling.
But that numbness doesn’t hold. Soon enough, Calvin’s frustration leaks through. Anger in A Pleasant Fiction is not volcanic. It doesn’t come in shouting matches or broken dishes. It emerges in weariness, in quiet resentment, in moments where the unfairness of it all becomes too much to bear. Calvin is angry at the world that let Jared suffer, angry at the parents who put so much of their energy into Jared’s care that Calvin often felt invisible, and angry at himself for the things left unsaid or undone. He doesn’t rage, but he seethes—especially when thinking about the emotional cost of years spent managing a home built around one person’s needs. In these moments, he’s not blaming Jared. He’s blaming the structure, the silence, the weight of expectations that left him emotionally stranded. The death of his mother brings another wave of frustration—not only because of her absence, but because she dies never knowing just how deeply she was loved. And that realization cuts Calvin in ways even he doesn’t fully expect.
The bargaining stage appears in Calvin’s tendency to revisit old decisions, to question what might have gone differently. He wonders if his father’s obsession with Solitaire’s music career—an obsession that squandered their lottery winnings—could have been redirected. He asks himself whether they could have done more for Jared. He turns over financial choices, medical decisions, family dynamics, not with the expectation of undoing them, but with the aching wish that maybe, if just one thing had gone differently, everything else might have followed. Bargaining, for Calvin, is the mental spiral that always begins with what if and ends with it wouldn’t have mattered, would it? It’s a way of pretending—briefly—that the story might have had another ending.
But it’s depression that settles in deepest. If A Pleasant Fiction has a dominant emotional texture, it’s this: the still, heavy sorrow of realizing that no amount of logic, reflection, or creative reframing will bring back the people who are gone. Calvin’s loss is not abstract. It’s tangible. It lives in the clothes he sorts through, in the silence of the rooms he used to avoid, in the echo of his brother’s cries. And in Chapter 9, as he begins to question not just what he’s lost but the very foundations of belief that once gave him comfort, the grief sharpens into despair. Calvin doesn’t just lose his family—he loses the God who was supposed to be watching over them. His anger at the universe deepens into disillusionment. And in the aftermath of multiple miscarriages and a painful pregnancy termination, he finds himself unable to pray, unable to pretend, unable to make sense of a world that feels increasingly cruel. The depression is not just sadness. It is theological. Existential. A question that refuses to be answered.
But eventually, in quiet, unsteady ways, acceptance begins to take root. Not as a victory. Not as closure. But as an acknowledgment: This is my life now. Calvin doesn’t emerge triumphant. He emerges tired. But still standing. In the final chapters, he begins to recognize what remains—his wife, his son, his friendships, his writing. He’s not whole. He never will be. But he is, for the first time, able to look around and see something worth holding on to. The moments with Dani, with Audrey, even the strange peace he finds in his dreams of his family—all of it speaks to a man who is learning how to live again, even if the version of life he now leads bears little resemblance to the one he imagined.
The five stages of grief are not presented as chapters in the book. Calvin doesn’t label them. He doesn’t map his feelings to a psychological model. But they are there, humming beneath the surface of his story. And more importantly, they are not neatly resolved. Just as Kübler-Ross herself later emphasized, the stages aren’t a ladder you climb or a finish line you reach. They are tides. They return.
In A Pleasant Fiction, grief is not an event—it’s an atmosphere. Calvin breathes it in and out. He learns to move through it. And in doing so, he becomes something more complex than a grieving son or a mourning brother. He becomes a man who understands that loss never really goes away. It just changes shape. And so do we.
